When the dismissal bell rang on Friday afternoon, Betty found herself swept into the hallway, as if a dam had broken. If she lifted her feet off the ground, she’d be carried off who knows where by the whooping crowd in their denim jackets and Converse sneakers, giving wedgies and smacking each other on the head. She felt part of the current, but she also felt apart. A part and apart. This was her biggest problem, not counting the note Phil Walsh had slipped her today in math: Do you like Coke or Pepsi better? How could she explain?
She was partial to Dr. Pepper, but her mother had started buying Tab instead, which tasted to Betty the way the inside of a storm drain smells. Betty knew the smell well because last spring she and Diane and Linda had ignored the No Trespassing signs and ventured inside the concrete pipe that ran through the culvert by North Glen Park. Stooped over like little old ladies, they slogged fifty yards through dead fish and debris to emerge at the other end reeking of creek water but otherwise unscathed.
Betty clutched her spiral notebook to her chest and wondered if she could still fit inside the storm drain. Her father used to say, “When you turn to the side, I can’t see you,” but he hasn’t cracked that joke for months, and recently, at Betty’s annual physical, Dr. Robbins instructed her mother to buy skim milk for Betty from now on. “She’s starting to fill out,” he said. “You need to keep it in check.” It was all very confusing. What was skim milk anyway? It sounded like scum, which was how Betty felt when her father and Dr. Robbins talked about her body.
She couldn’t decide if she minded when Phil Walsh talked about her body, or when he wrote in her yearbook last year, “Gee I like your legs when you wear dem short britches.” Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep, Betty imagined holding hands with Phil while sitting on a velvet sofa or a bench by a misty lake.
The crowd rushed through the lobby and out the main doors, spilling Betty onto the walkway in front of the school. Finally, she could feel her feet beneath her, and she slipped her notebook in her shoulder bag. She’d started carrying a purse this year, and it took her a while to get the hang of it. She was forever leaving it in classrooms and having to retrace her steps, only to find it dangling from the back of a chair or, once, perched on the teacher’s desk, the last stop before Lost and Found.
She walked swiftly now toward the crosswalk. She was hungry and eager to get home, but suddenly Linda appeared on her left, Diane on her right, their shoulder bags swinging as they caught up with her. “And just where do you think you’re going?” Linda said.
Linda had a big mouth and a big butt and she was always telling Betty what to do and what to wear, as if she were older than Betty, even though Betty was older by ten weeks and four days. “You look better in cords, not jeans,” Linda told her. “And if you’re going to wear foundation, apply it all over your face, not just your T-zone, otherwise, you look spotty like a leopard but not in a cool way.” Though the words stung, Betty always felt more confident when she took Linda’s advice because Linda always seemed so confident when she dispensed it.
“I’m going home,” Betty told her friends. “I’m tired.”
“Maybe you have mono,” Diane offered. “I had it last summer.”
“We know!” Betty and Linda said at the same time. Then they both said, “Jinx,” at the same time, and then they both laughed, and Diane said there was nothing funny about mono. Diane, who was called Ironing Board by the boys, didn’t find much of anything funny these days. She was always in a bad mood, and Linda said it was because Diane hadn’t gotten her period yet, and Diane said she hadn’t gotten her period yet because she’d had mono. “It threw my system out of whack,” she said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Linda said. She eyed Betty suspiciously. “Did you forget we’re going to the mall?”
Betty clamped her hand over her mouth like, oh god, she had forgotten, but the truth was she’d been invited to Robin’s party tonight, and she wanted to go home and eat a HoHo and wash her hair and practice her dance moves without having to explain herself to her friends. They’d be mad at her for not asking Robin if they could come too, which would’ve been the decent thing to do. Why had she not done that? Did she think she was better than them? Was she?
Of course Betty knew that everyone was equal. Her mother had instilled that in her. Blacks were equal to whites, and women were equal to men, and nobody was better than anybody else, but Betty was pretty sure that certain people at school were better than she was. She wanted to be cool like them, but she was self-conscious with stringy hair and pimples, which she apparently had trouble concealing. Sometimes instead of listening to Mrs. Hamlin explain linear equations, she tried to figure out what made the popular kids popular. She wished she could’ve studied popularity instead of pre-algebra.
One theory Betty came up with was birthdays. With a few exceptions, the popular kids were born in the fall and winter. Another theory was last names. Most of the popular kids had last names that started with letters in the first third of the alphabet. Betty would like to talk to someone about this, but who would understand? Betty was born in June. Her last name started with M. Nothing could be done.
The girls entered the mall through the side entrance, past the cigarette machines and the giant fountain where, until recently, they had tossed coins and made wishes. If she wasn’t too old for that now, Betty would toss a penny and wish that she were the girl on Soul Train who wore bell-bottoms and a shimmery blouse tied at the waist, feather earrings swinging as she danced. Her moves—and her skin—were smooth, and she smiled in a knowing way, as if lit from within.
At Scotty’s Chuckwagon, Linda and Diane ordered Cokes and fries and Betty ordered water, which came in a small wax cup. “Have some,” Linda said, pushing her fries toward Betty, but Betty said she wasn’t hungry, which wasn’t true, but she didn’t like chewing in front of people, not even her friends, which was why she ate a carton of yogurt for lunch every day. You don’t have to chew yogurt. It never gets caught in your braces.
They flipped through album bins at the Record Bar, and later at Casual Corner they squeezed into the same dressing room to try on T-shirts. Betty felt smothered again, like she’d felt in the hall after school. The fluorescent lights made her head hurt, and music blared from the ceiling. The floor was sprinkled with sawdust.
Diane chose a brown tee with red stripes, and Linda chose an orange tee with green stripes, and Betty picked a white tee with a rainbow swirl across the front.
“You chose that shirt because it draws attention to your boobs,” Linda said.
“Yeah, right,” Betty said, rolling her eyes, but then she wondered if Linda was right. Maybe she’d chosen the shirt subconsciously. Her boobs weren’t as big as Linda’s, but she wasn’t a pancake like Diane, who wore a padded bra.
Buoyed by the thought of wearing her new shirt to Robin’s party tonight, Betty sang along with Diane and Linda to “Brandy,” which was coming through the speakers. “The sailors say, Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good, wise human being.”
Linda and Diane stopped singing. They exchanged wide-eyed glances and then burst out laughing. Diane laughed so hard she doubled over, holding her stomach, and Linda fell back against the dressing room wall. “Listen up you nitwit!” Linda said, and when the chorus came back around, she and Diane sang at the top of their lungs.“The sailors say, Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be.” And now there was Betty, crying in shame, blotting her eyes with the back of her hand.
Eventually they stopped laughing, and Linda admitted she liked Betty’s lyrics better. They weren’t as demeaning to Brandy, who was too dumb to realize she was being used. “Those sailors have no idea what kind of wife Brandy would be,” Diane said in solidarity.
When Betty finally stopped crying, Linda whispered, “Okay, now watch carefully,” and she ripped the tag off the T-shirt she’d tried on and stuffed it in the back pocket of her jeans, then over the T, she slipped on her blouse and buttoned it up. “Voila!” She pointed to Diane. “Your turn,” and Diane giggled and followed Linda’s lead, and then Betty, who felt dumber than Brandy, did the same, and the next thing she knew, they were heading out the store, back into the current of the mall.
“I’ve really got to get home now,” Betty said. She felt sick to her stomach, and she wondered if it was because she was hungry.
“We have one more stop,” Linda said, and she ushered her friends past World Bazaar and Thom McAn to the entrance of Ivey’s. “We’re going to pick out some earrings to go with our new shirts,” she announced. She made a clicking sound with her tongue like a dog trainer, and Betty, who hadn’t given much thought to earrings, suddenly realized that she needed a new pair.
The security guard stood out even though he was trying to blend in. Blond, with a corny haircut, he wore jeans and a stiff denim jacket. He wasn’t browsing the jewelry counter. He was standing there like a dork daring them to steal. Betty’s heart raced but everything else slowed as she spotted a pair of feather earrings. Pale orange with silver hooks. She lifted them from the rack and slipped them in her purse. Somehow she knew what was coming before it came: the clamp of the guard’s hand on her forearm. From the corner of her eye, she spotted Diane and Linda running from the store. Betty jerked her arm away and took off toward her friends.
The guard took off too, chasing the girls through the mall and into the parking lot. Their shoulder bags thwacked against their hips as they ran. Betty’s legs felt heavy. She was sweating, and something felt stuck in her chest. She imagined being back at the jewelry counter, picking up the earrings, then putting them back.
“Stop!” the guard called, and the girls, out of breath, stopped. Betty turned and put her hands in the air, and when Linda laughed, Betty crossed her arms over her chest, and the three of them, eyes cast downward, followed the guard back to Ivey’s.
In a windowless office on the second floor, the guard ordered the girls to dump the contents of their purses onto the metal desk where he sat. Then he sifted through crumpled bills and folded notes and broken pencils and tubes of Lip Smackers—to retrieve a pair of feather earrings and two pairs of silver hoops. Betty stared at the hoops and wondered if she should’ve stolen those instead.
The guard told the girls if they ever stepped foot in the store again, he’d arrest them. “I’m turning your cases over to juvenile court,” he said. Then he called their mothers and told them to pick up their delinquent daughters from the mall, but Linda’s mother’s car was in the shop, and Diane’s mother was late to pick up Diane’s brother from football practice, and Betty’s mother had a casserole in the oven, so the girls walked home, dizzy in the sunlight.
“That dude can’t arrest us,” Linda said as they crossed the intersection and headed down the hill to North Glen. “He’s not a police officer.”
The neighborhood didn’t have sidewalks, so Betty walked along the curb and Diane walked in people’s yards and Linda walked down the middle of the road like a wild animal that didn’t know the rules. Betty thought about Robin’s party and wondered if she’d be allowed to go now that she was a delinquent.
“Look,” Linda said. She whipped a ballpoint pen from her back pocket and raised it above her head as if it were a trophy. “I swiped it off that cocksucker’s desk. He didn’t even notice.” She chucked the pen onto someone’s driveway.
Diane bent over, hands on her knees, and laughed hard. She swung her hair around. A lot. “What a cocksucker.”
“Yeah,” Betty said. “Cocksucker.”
“At least we have new shirts,” Linda said, and Diane laughed, and Betty laughed too.
“Casual Corner is too casual about shoplifters. If they hadn’t made it so easy for us, we wouldn’t have gone to Ivey’s, and we wouldn’t be in trouble,” Linda said.
Diane laughed. “Right on! This is all Casual Corner’s fault!”
They walked a while in silence, and then the mood shifted, and Linda said, “My mom is going to have a cow. I’m going to be grounded.”
“Me too,” Diane said.
“Me too,” Betty said, though she’d never been grounded before.
Betty’s house was first. It was a dumb house, with the bedrooms downstairs and the kitchen and living room upstairs. Betty’s mother called it modern, but it felt flimsy to Betty. Like a paper bag with holes. Their cat, Barney, lolled in the driveway. A lone pine in the front yard leaned to the left, but no one did anything about it.
From her front stoop, Betty watched her friends walk away. “See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya,” Linda called.
Betty imagined her mother waiting for her at the door, scowling, hands on her hips, but her mother was upstairs playing Helen Reddy full blast. It was Friday afternoon. Her father was still at work. Betty went to her room and closed the door. Her stomach growled. She removed her blouse and looked at herself in the mirror, in the rainbow tee. She took off the shirt and stuffed it in a drawer, and put her blouse back on.
While she waited for her mom to barge in and yell at her, she put on her headgear and painted her nails baby blue and read her horoscope. Then she put on Rags to Rufus and practiced her dance moves. She tried to remember the dance that Robin and her friends had done today outside the gym during lunch. It was like a cheer routine only sexier, set to the song “Fire.” They shimmied and shook their hips, and Robin stuck out her tongue a lot, and all the boys leaned against the wall and watched, and when it was over, the girls were out of breath, and the boys were too, and Hal Latham asked them to do it again, and so they did.
They weren’t as cool as Soul Train, but they were pretty good, and Betty tried to think of something she was good at, but she couldn’t think of anything. She wasn’t even good at shoplifting. Miss Carter had said she was good at poetry. In her yearbook, she’d written, “Best wishes to Betty, the Poet of 1975 in Room 124!” Miss Carter loved poetry, especially “Ozymandius,” but poetry wasn’t cool. No one stood around at lunch watching you read a poem and asking you to read it again when you were done.
At five thirty, Betty heard her father’s car in the driveway, and at six o’clock, no one had come downstairs to yell at her, so Betty went upstairs for supper, which consisted of tuna casserole and a lecture by her father, an electrical engineer who wore horn-rimmed glasses and high-water pants. Linda called him “Eggbert” behind his back. She and Diane would pile onto Betty’s bed like puppies and laugh and laugh. “What an egghead,” they’d say, and Betty would laugh too even though she wanted to cry. She wished her dad was cool.
“You know better than to steal,” her father said. Betty stared at her plate. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
Betty said she was sorry.
“I blame Nixon!” her mother said with her fork in the air. “How are young people supposed to know right from wrong when our nation’s leaders are liars and thieves?”
Her father’s face grew red. “Leave Nixon out of this.”
Betty sat quietly, hoping her parents would keep fighting and forget that their only child was a delinquent, but then her mother said, “I think you need to take a break from Diane and Linda. They’re bad influences on you.”
Was that true? It seemed to Betty that they were bad influences on each other, like flavors that don’t go together, like catsup and ice cream. But the bigger problem, Betty knew, was that she was a bad influence on herself. When she was very quiet, she could feel something wasn’t square inside her, as if she were growing crooked, like the pine tree in the yard.
Betty drew in a breath. This was her chance. “Maybe you’re right,” she said finally. “Maybe I should take a break from Linda and Diane and focus on my other friends. Like Robin. She invited me to her party tonight.”
“Tonight!” her father shouted. “You’re not going anywhere tonight, young lady!” He banged the table with his fist like an angry father on TV. “You’re not going anywhere for a very long time!”
Betty wondered if this meant she was grounded, but then her mother placed her hand on her father’s forearm. “Now, James. Let’s talk about this rationally.”
“She’s a thief! And she resisted arrest!”
“She wasn’t arrested,” her mother said with a smirk. She turned to Betty. “You just made a mistake, that’s all. You lost your judgment for a second. I did the same thing once.”
“You did?” Betty asked.
“I was in the Winn Dixie parking lot, loading groceries in the car, when I realized I hadn’t paid for a bag of cat litter. It was on the lower tray of my cart, and I’d forgotten about it. I should’ve gone back inside to pay for it, but I was in a hurry, so I put the bag in the car and drove home.”
Betty tried to imagine her mother—a pear-shaped woman with a perm—driving home from the store with a bag of stolen cat litter in her trunk.
“When was this?” her father asked.
“I don’t remember. Last spring?”
“The next time you went to Winn Dixie, you told them about it, right?”
“For heaven’s sake, James. Not everyone is as saintly as you are. I bet you’ve never broken a law in your life.”
“I’ve broken the law,” Betty’s father said.
“What did you do? Jaywalk?” Betty’s mother said with a snort. “When you were five?”
Betty smiled. If she didn’t smile, then her mother would notice how hurt her father looked, and the focus would shift back to Betty’s delinquency.
When her father pushed his chair from the table and stormed out of the room, Betty looked at her mother who was looking out the window. After a pause, her mother asked if Diane and Linda would be at the party, and Betty told her they weren’t invited, which was true.
It was also true that Betty hadn’t been invited to the party either. When she’d overheard Robin talking about it today after the dance routine, Betty asked if she could come. Robin winced and sucked in her lips. “I guess so,” she said, giggling and ducking into the girls’ bathroom with her friends. Betty watched in awe as they moved together as one, an octopus with eight arms and one brain, one heart.
“Well,” her mother said. “I have book club at 8. I can drop you off on my way, but I’ll need to pick you up early. Like 10:30.”
Betty wasn’t sure she wanted to go to the party anymore, but there she was, going. There she was, stealing. There she was, rushing down the hallway. There she was, watching the popular girls dance. There she was, inviting herself to go. She thanked her mother and then got up and started clearing the table, but her mother said she’d do it, so Betty went to her room. From her window, she could see her father in the carport, tinkering with his tools. He was always trying to fix stuff, leaky tires and broken toasters, but he couldn’t fix Betty.
She took a shower and put on her new shirt and her old earrings and covered her entire face with foundation and dabbed Love’s Baby Soft behind her ears and between her collar bones. When she was ready, she opened her bedroom door to see her mother in a mauve pantsuit plodding down the hall, shaking her head. Her face was pinched and gray.
“What?” Betty said.
“I just got off the phone with Mrs. Pittman,” her mother said. “She is very upset over what transpired at the mall today, and Diane is grounded for a month. No friends over. No phone. No after school clubs. Linda has the same punishment, and Mrs. Pittman has recommended it for you, too, and after thinking it over, I’ve decided that she’s right.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, honey. I know I said you could go to the party, but—”
“I can’t believe you let Diane’s mother boss you around! You’re such a wimp!” Betty stepped back into her room. Just before she slammed the door, she paused, wanting to give her mother a good look at her, wondering if her mother might notice her new shirt.
Not long after that, Betty’s parents separated, and Betty’s mother took a secretarial job at Newcomb Heating and Air and moved to the Camelot Apartments, near the school. Betty moved in with her. Linda joined the chorus, and Diane, Diane!, started going with Phil Walsh, and Betty started eating lunch with the kids from Camelot. All their parents were divorced. The girls lived with their mothers and wore sweatshirts and played sports, and the boys lived with their fathers and wore flannel shirts and didn’t play sports. After school, while the girls were at volleyball practice, the boys went into the woods and smoked cigarettes and sometimes pot. One day, they invited Betty to come, and she took a few hits, and then they all went to Kwik Pit for candy, and Betty bought a Nutty Buddy, which tasted like toenails, and she could hear the rush of her heart in her ears, and she wondered if she were a ghost. After that, whenever the boys invited her to the woods, she’d tell them she had to babysit, and she’d walk back to Camelot alone and go straight to her room and do her homework and listen to Stevie Wonder and read “Ozymandias” until her mother got home.
In early December, Betty’s parents picked her up from school, and they drove downtown for her appointment with Mr. O’Dell Jones, the juvenile court counselor. Betty’s father wore a coat and tie, and Betty wore a skirt. Her mother made her. They looked like they were going to church. The courthouse looked sort of like a church.
Betty imagined that Mr. Jones would be a dork, like the security guard at Ivey’s, but he looked like Don Cornelius instead, with a fat tie and big glasses. He told Betty’s parents to wait on the bench outside his office while he talked to Betty.
He opened her file. “You stole a pair of earrings from North Glen Mall?”
“Yes sir,” Betty said.
Mr. Jones’s office smelled like the library at school. On the wall hung a black and white photograph of a bridge half concealed by clouds. In the window, a spider plant hung from a macrame hanger.
He asked Betty more questions, like what was her best subject in school, and what did she want to be when she grew up, and what was her favorite TV show. Then he asked her why she stole the earrings. Nobody had asked her that, and she told him the truth: She wanted to be cool.
Mr. Jones stroked his chin like he was trying to understand. “And stealing makes you cool?”
Betty shook her head. “I made a mistake,” she said.
The room grew quiet, and Mr. Jones adjusted his glasses and gazed at Betty with a tender smile, like the parents in the children’s cough medicine commercial who wrap their arms around each other as they gaze down at their little girl who has a bad cold but is finally asleep, snuggled with her teddy bear. It was a stupid commercial, but whenever Betty saw it, it made her cry. “I’m not recommending your case for court,” he said. “I know you’re not going to steal again.”
Betty wondered how Mr. Jones knew that, and if it was true because he said it, or if he said it because it was true. It didn’t matter. The important thing was that there would be no formal record of her theft. It was almost as if it had never happened, as if she’d put the earrings back on the rack, and the shirt, too, she decided. Everything had been forgiven. “Thank you,” Betty said.
Mr. Jones kept smiling at Betty, which would normally make Betty feel embarrassed, but she didn’t feel embarrassed. Instead, she felt herself moving toward herself. It was not unlike the sensation she experienced when Barney was a kitten and fell asleep on her neck, or, last week, when she got her braces off, all that metal, finally, out of her mouth. But this was better. She understood then that she was always a part and never apart, and she felt herself filling with a warm light. Everything was coming together. Her breath was slow and even now, and where there had been sadness, there was air.
Later, on the way to the parking garage, Betty’s mother walked beside her, squeezing her hand and rambling on about how Betty must have impressed Mr. Jones with her good manners and intelligence. Her father, who was walking several feet ahead of them in his highwaters, turned and said, “You got lucky, young lady. You need to keep your nose clean from now on.”
On the drive back, Betty’s mother suggested they stop at Darryl’s to celebrate, but her father said he had to get back to work. Betty’s mother lit a cigarette, and her father rolled down his window. Her mother turned on the radio; her father turned it off.
Betty’s heart pounded in her chest as a familiar sense of doom settled over her. She pressed her forehead, hard, against the car window, and ran her tongue over her teeth, where her braces used to be. Already she could feel her teeth shifting out of alignment, back to their familiar places. Crooked and imperfect, they would not be retained.
